Rain destroying home turf / Hillside slide threatens property

Published 4:00 am, Monday, December 23, 2002

Every day since the storms hit, Ying Gong has put on her raincoat and stepped outside to check the array of drains, pumps, plastic tarps and sandbags.

They are her defense against the pouring rain. More to the point, they are what she hopes will protect her from the hillside above. It has been sliding toward her home, first like a stampede and later inch by inch, for nearly a year.

The routine is well-known to people living in steep-sloped Bay Area suburbs or in parts of San Francisco, but Gong doesn't live in those places.

She lives in Oakland's flatlands, below a rise that gives her a major case of insomnia every time the winter weather comes rolling in.

"I just can't sleep when it rains like this," said Gong, 67, in the midst of a downpour last week. "I have to make myself busy or watch TV for weather reports just to stay awake."

Last February, torrential rain caused a swath of hillside 80 yards wide to collapse into her backyard -- and into the backyards of two adjacent homes she and her husband own on 14th Avenue.

Oakland officials quickly red-tagged three homes above the Gongs on Wallace Street. The homes were hanging precariously after the slide, with parts of their foundations exposed.

Occupants of the sagging homes were forced to vacate. The owner of one of the homes, Jason Griffin, 23, said last year he hoped his insurance would pay for the damage and shore up the hillside.

That didn't happen, city officials say.

And what were once three tidy backyards below are now wedged between the Gongs' houses and the slope that sags against them. The mass includes a tree trunk, remnants of fence wire and even a cinder-block wall.

Jumbled up in all the debris are the lifelong dreams of the retired neighborhood store owners whose homes represent their lifetime investments.

If city officials move to red-tag the Gongs' homes along with the vacant ones on the hill, the senior couple's finances would be as devastated as their property would be if the hill and the houses on it decide to tumble the rest of the way.

Their lives are locked up in the neighborhood, not far from downtown Oakland and near Highland Hospital. In addition to living there, they operated Gong's Market directly across the street from their house for 38 years until they sold it.

Next thing they knew, they were under siege.

After last year's slide, the city hired a geological consultant who tested the hill and determined that it is stable -- for now, at least.

City officials are keeping a close watch on the situation, said Calvin Wong,

the city's building director.

"Even if one of the buildings fell, it would hit the top of the slide mass and just sit there," he said.

But that's no comfort to the Gongs, who rent two of their homes.

With this year's downpours beginning to hit with alarming succession, the Gongs live on pins and needles with every storm -- and last week was more like one continuous blast of water.

"There's nothing really I can do," said Ying Gong. "I tell my tenants, 'Don't sleep in the bedroom, sleep in front. In case something happens, you can run out.' "

She's spent the brief interludes of dry weather cleaning out garages, basements and preparing for more rain.

"I used to have 70 sunflowers on that hill," she said, pointing up to what was once a terraced garden. "All kinds of greens, cherry tomatoes.

"I know sooner or later, before the winter is over, all of this mud will be down here."

Then she pointed to a steady trickle of water coming from a portion of the rain-soaked mass. She believes the slope can absorb no more water, and no drainage system can siphon off enough water.

She and her husband keep their bags packed just in case and have told their tenants to do the same.

In this winter's torrents, she is the only one in the neighborhood who is fighting back to keep the slide at bay, never mind the city's finding.

She was surprised that so little was done to shore up the slope during the sunny months of summer. One hillside property owner installed a ribbed plastic drainage pipe that runs on the sidewalk alongside the Gongs' home -- but it doesn't seem to be diverting any of the runoff.

"I haven't seen any water come out of there, and I've been checking all the time," she said.

The property owners above, meanwhile, have been unresponsive or financially unable to repair the damage or pay to have the homes razed, Wong said.

The Gongs have retained an attorney who has asked city officials to hold off condemnation proceedings on the teetering homes, he said.

They think they know what has turned what was once a stable knoll into an unpredictable mass of mush -- a construction project, done without a city permit, to reinforce the foundation of one of the homes above theirs.

"All I can tell you is that last February, this yard was above mine," she said, pointing to the wall of earth in what was once her backyard.